IS300 tear down and track car build

Chuck33079 · 01-27-2013, 10:06 AM

I decided to write up a log of my other car build just in case anyone might be interested. it's a 2003 Lexus IS300 5 speed. I bought it from a friend to use as a daily driver a few years ago. He took fantastic care of the car, and when I bought it off him with 115k miles it didn't look a day older than 40k miles. It was bone stock. That didn't last long.

I swapped out the sways for a set from Hotchkis and put on Swift springs and Tokico 5 way adjustable shocks. A Tanabe cat back, Megan headers and a JoeZ intake made a slow car be slightly less slow and sound good. The bigger sways kept snapping OEM endlinks, so a set of Figs engineering links solved that problem. I topped it off with a short shifter and weighted shift knob, and drove it daily for another 20k miles.

The previous owner and I had been discussing splitting the costs of a track car for years, and once I picked up the Z to drive every day it occurred to me that the IS would be an ideal track car. Rather than buy an unknown vehicle for 5k with a ton of miles on it, why not use the perfectly maintained vehicle. It's not going to be the fastest car out there, but tons of guys track Miatas and they're much slower.

So, the decision was made. He would buy a set of track tires and all necessary safety items- cage, seats, harnesses, etc. I'd contribute the car and odds and ends. Black Friday sales and combing the forums for used stuff supplied me with a set of prosport gauges, an old Blitz AFC and some other little stuff. I still had a catless Y-pipe to put in now that I'm not concerned with it being too loud.

The first step was to get the interior out and sell it to fund further parts purchases. This was to be a completely DIY low cost track car, so anything recouped from parts sales would be huge. Luckily, somebody bought the entire interior. Other little bits sold pretty quickly. We ordered a set of OMP seats and harnesses, a full Autopower cage and all of the mounts and sliders we would need. The interior came out pretty nicely, but it's a huge pain n the *** avoiding breaking all the little panel clips. Now we were left with an empty shell to work with.

The next project was the sound deadening. This stuff looked like it was going to be hard to get out. Luckily it came right up after letting some dry ice sit on it for a while and whacking it with a hammer. Other than some on the transmission tunnel that seems to be invulnerable to conventional weaponry, it's bare metal through the entire car now. It'll get a coat of paint soon to correct all of the little dings we put in chipping up sound deadening. There was probably 20 lbs of it in the car.

The next things to be tackled are going to be a little harder. The dash needs to come out, both to get the useless stuff behind it out of the car and to paint it. For some reason IS300 dashboards get sticky and nasty in hotter climates. The sunroof needs to be taken out, with a piece of metal riveted over the hole.

Once those are finished, the cage and seats should be here. I'll keep this updated as things arrive. I'd like to have the car ready to go in a month or two. My goal is to get the car sitting at about 2750-2800 lbs with somewhere around 210-220 whp. It'll be fast enough to have fun with, but it's not so fast that I'll kill myself.

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